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Steve Hamm in
Michael Rhodin, Senior Vice President, IBM Watson Group
By Michael Rhodin
When IBM’s Watson arrived on the scene three years ago, it did one thing really well: Answer written questions very quickly on a wide range of topics. It amazed all of us with its understanding of language and its ability to sort through vast amounts of data in seconds. But that was just the beginning.
Today, IBM Watson is on a path to augment and scale human expertise on a variety of dimensions. As a software geek, I’m really excited about this. We’re architecting a technology development system, called the Watson Platform, which will be like a library for cognitive technologies. Scientists within IBM Research and engineers in the Watson Group are building discrete cognitive components that can be pulled off the virtual shelf by developers at IBM, by entrepreneurs and by corporate developers–and used in any number of applications. Continue Reading »
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Steve Hamm in
Robert LeBlanc, Sr. VP, IBM
By Robert LeBlanc
Near my home in Westchester County north of New York City, there’s a shopping mall that stands head-and-shoulders above all the rest. It has the best stores, is conveniently located in an urban area with easy access to the highway, and offers shoppers a mobile app so they can easily find their way around. The top retailers want to be there for all those reasons, and for the marketing and promotional opportunities provided by the mall. It’s a magnet for shoppers and retailers alike.
With the creation of the IBM Cloud Marketplace, we are going after that same premium experience – but with technology. The IBM Cloud marketplace, a new digital channel for IBM, is part of a shift in how we deliver capabilities. This cloud marketplace and others like it will increasingly be the places where the imperatives of business are addressed by technology and the expertise of innovation thought leaders. They are where business and technology will meet.
I wrote two months ago that we are in the process of reimagining IBM—how we operate and how we deliver value to clients and society.Over time, we will continue to deliver more capabilities, innovations, and expertise from the cloud. Think of it as “IBM as a Service.”
The IBM Cloud Marketplace, open for business today, will be one of the primary channels through which we deliver IBM as a Service. In addition, we will collaborate with partners from our global ecosystem to deliver hundreds of cloud services for the enterprise.
By Chris Sciacca
To create more energy-efficient clouds, crunch Big Data faster and design smaller, instrumented devices for a smarter planet, we need a new generation of technologies. This new generation will require even further improvements at the nano-scale to create more efficient transistors.
But before these microscopic technologies go into mass production, new techniques are needed for creating microscopic prototypes smaller than 30 nanometers — the size when prototyping becomes increasingly difficult. In 2010 IBM scientists published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal of Science demonstrating the technique by designing a nano-sized map of the world and now in 2014 the research is coming to market. Continue Reading »
Casey Cox, Conservation Coordinator, Flint River Partnership
By Casey Cox
Growing up on our family farm in southwest Georgia amidst the pine flatwoods and oak hammocks of the Flint River, I learned how agriculture operates in an environmental context.
The Flint River is part of one of the richest, most biologically diverse ecoregions in the world. The abundance of our natural resources, including water, drives south Georgia’s agricultural economy. Our culture revolves around nature and cultivates a deep incentive for landowners to conserve our resource base for future generations.
When my ancestors chose the banks of the Flint River to settle more than 170 years ago, they could not have anticipated that they were settling atop one of the world’s most sustainable aquifers. Two years ago, aquifer levels were at their lowest point in recorded history. Now, after significant rainfall, the aquifer is maintaining average levels. This recharge capacity means that progressive and sustainable management of our water resources will allow us to continue irrigating crops for generations to come. Continue Reading »
Sumit Gupta, GM, Tesla Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA
By Sumit Gupta
Last week, while on a road trip to southern California with my family, I had one of those moments that parents treasure. I impressed my kids with what I do for a living.
They wanted to know what song was playing on the radio, so I ran the song through the Shazam music app on my phone. I proudly told my kids that Shazam uses a type of high-performance computer processor from my group at NVIDIA to rapidly search and identify songs from its 27-million track database. That lightning-quick computing task took place in a far-off data center in the cloud, but, for the kids, it seemed like magic happening in the palm of my hand. “Cool, dad!”
The moment was especially thrilling for me because I foresee an explosion of innovation taking place in cloud data centers. One of the forces fueling this phenomenon is an initiative called the OpenPOWER Foundation.
Jack Cochran, MD, Executive Director of The Permanente Federation
By Jack Cochran, MD
In today’s health care field, technology has enabled the unprecedented ability to gather and share information and support physicians in ways that could only be imagined in recent decades. Electronic health records, smart phones, and intelligence like IBM’s Watson are accelerating the rate of information sharing and redefining the “office visit” for patients and physicians alike.
This powerful shift has taken us from the Industrial Age to the Information Age where our questions have evolved from, “How often should you see a patient?” to “What’s the best way to monitor a condition?” and, “How can we encourage patients to follow prevention protocols?” to, “How can we create systems that increase preventative outcomes?” Continue Reading »
By Richard Dicks
Businesses today are stepping up their investments in exciting technologies such as mobile, cloud, big data and social. In fact, over the next three years, cloud’s strategic importance to business users is expected to double from 34 percent to 72 percent, even surpassing their IT counterparts at 58 percent. *
As companies execute on these strategies, what becomes of the existing IT equipment? In a number of cases this equipment has value – value that may also help fund these transformational projects.
So, what’s the right approach? Getting the greatest value from your used IT and ensuring that equipment that can’t be reused is recycled in a responsible way requires the right IT asset recovery provider. Continue Reading »
Kent Deverell, CEO, Fluid Inc.
By Kent Deverell
After a long, cold winter, spring is finally arriving – meaning shoppers will be out in full force looking for the latest in warm weather fashions.
As consumers begin the process of researching these products, they’ll be looking for the most complete, immediately available source of information. So it’s very likely their visits to a retailer’s store will segue into visits online. Of course, retailers want that brick and mortar experience to transition to their websites; close the loop, make the sale.
But, consumers’ online shopping experiences don’t always compare to what they’ve come to expect when entering a retail store. Online, is there a helpful rep to guide consumers to the right products, based on asking the right questions and taking into account your unique needs? Continue Reading »
Dr. Dinesh Verma, IBM Fellow
To say mobile data traffic is getting congested would be the understatement of at least the last year. That’s because in that span of time, traffic from mobile devices has grown 81 percent. To help manage this data tsunami and keep information flowing, Dr. Dinesh Verma, IBM Fellow, worked on technologies applying IT principles to wireless networks. He and his wife, Paridhi Verma, Government and Education Marketing Manager at IBM, put their findings in a new book, Techniques for Surviving Mobile Data Explosion, that details the challenge and solution. The Smarter Planet blog caught up with Verma recently for more insight.
Smarter Planet: How much mobile data are we talking about?
Dinesh Verna: A huge amount of mobile data! As a sample point, global mobile data traffic grew 81 percent in 2013, and by the end of 2013 had reached 1.5 exabytes per month. That’s up from 820 petabytes per month at the end of 2012.
To provide some perspective, the total amount of data transferred in one full year on the Internet was about 1 exabyte just a decade ago, in 2004.
Laurence Guihard-Joly, General Manager, IBM Business Continuity and Resilience Services
By Laurence Guihard-Joly
Every company needs electricity, but that doesn’t require building a power plant. Many organizations have reached the same conclusion about computing and storage needs. Why build out data centers if it’s not your core business? Plus it can be a costly proposition.
That’s basically the premise of cloud computing – turn to trusted partners for your computing needs so you can focus on the business. But when deciding on a cloud strategy, organizations should be careful not to simply focus on saving money.
To be sure, moving to the cloud is economical and brings greater efficiencies, but it’s also an opportunity to reexamine everything from finance systems to enterprise resource planning and even the helpdesk. It can be a means of improving business efficiency over every operation that runs on software. Adding redundancy and automating backup are two functions most cloud providers offer, with more or less sophistication. A cloud strategy – public, hybrid, private – is also an excellent place to rethink security and continuity strategy and options across the board. Continue Reading »
